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104 10 The Capture and Rescue of the Girls At the beginning of 1776 the few settlers in Kentucky faced a dire situation. Indians raiding near Boonesborough in December 1775 had killed and scalped one settler. Further raids were highly likely. Ammunition was growing “scant.”1 The British, from their fort in Detroit, were believed to be stirring up the Miamis and other Indian tribes to attack the barely two hundred settlers still in Kentucky. The threat of large-scale Indian attacks, and the fact of Indian raids, kept the settlers “forted up”—confined to or near their crude forts at Boonesborough , Harrodsburg, and St. Asaph’s, greatly restricted in what they could plant or harvest, unable to hunt far from the forts, unable to obtain new clothes, and without enough salt to preserve the meat they had. The cabins were small and dark, glass not being used in early Kentucky settlements. At least in Boonesborough’s case, cabin floors may have been bare dirt.2 Beds were covered with skins of buffalo, bear, and elk.3 Picture, as settlers remembering those days described it, long confinement in “a row or two of Smoky cabins, among dirty women and men with greasy hunting shirts.” Picture people “dirty, lousy, ragged and half starved.”4 Add stink and ghastly hygiene to the picture. Col. William Fleming, a physician by training, visiting Harrodsburg in the bitter winter of 1779–80, noted that the fort’s one spring was situated in the lowest corner of the fort: “The whole dirt and filth of the Fort, putrified flesh, dead dogs, horse, cow, hog excrements and human odour [ordure ?] all washed into it. Furthermore, the situation could hardly have been improved by the Ashes and sweepings of filthy Cabbins, the dirtiness of the people, steeping skins to dress and washing every sort of dirty rags and cloths in the spring makes the most filthy nauseous potation of the water imaginable and will certainly contribute to render the inhabitants of this place sickly.”5 105 The Capture and Rescue of the Girls The stations housed few men and far fewer women. A member of a party surveying land around the Falls of the Ohio for the Transylvania Company in January 1776 said Boonesborough had only six women—the wives of Daniel Boone and of Squire Boone, Daniel Boone’s daughter Susannah (married to William Hays), and three others.6 The hollow square in which Boonesborough cabins were arranged was still incomplete.7 Harrodsburg was not much bigger, having, according to a May 1777 census, only eightyfive men and twenty-four adult women.8 Harrodsburg grew both by the arrival of new settlers, including some who moved from Boonesborough, and by births. Early in 1776 a woman named Mrs. Hugh Wilson gave birth to the first non-Indian child born in Kentucky. According to Boone’s nineteenthcentury biographer Lyman Draper, the child “was named Harrod Wilson and grew up to be a worthless man.”9 It would have made sense, as George Rogers Clark recognized, under the threat of Indian attack, to consolidate the settlements’ scattered feeble forces into one larger fortification, but the settlers’ “dependence upon hunting for the greatest portion of [their] provisions forbade this”: “No people could be in a more alarming position. Detached at least two hundred miles from the nearest settlement of the states, we were surrounded by numerous Indian nations, each one far superior to ourselves in numbers and spurred on by the British Government to destroy us.”10 The settlers’ confinement in their forts hindered their ability to plant or harvest crops and increased their dependence on hunting. An analysis of bone fragments from a hearth at Boonesborough—probably dating back to forting-up times, judging by the presence of buffalo bones—gives some indication of what the settlers ate: some beef and pig but also deer, black bear, buffalo, turkey, elk, and channel catfish.11 The settlers’ reliance on hunting increased the killing of game and decreased the game population in Kentucky. The cycle that threatened Boone’s favorite way of life was accelerating. Despite the Indian threat, beginning in the spring of 1776, more settlers came into Kentucky, both up though the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio River. Each succeeding spring saw more settlers arrive, even though the Indian threat kept growing. In March 1776 an Indian trader named Louis Lorimier came from Montreal to the British garrison at Detroit to help to incite the Indians against the...

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